I grew up in a family of very practical people, and for many years, I followed that way of thinking about life. Things were either right or wrong and there was no in between. Ideas that seemed foreign to me I quickly dismissed as nonsense. I had strong teachings of my birth family to fall back on when I found something new to ponder, and if this new idea didn’t fit, it was quickly and adamantly rejected. And for many years, this worked just fine for me. Not perfectly, though, or I wouldn’t be where I am now.
I knew from the beginning there was something a little different about me, something others probably described as weird. Because even though I accepted the things I was told eventually, I always had to ask a million questions about it beforehand. It was my nature, they said. And it was very aggravating to those who tried to teach me.
As then as the pages of my life turned, and I drifted away from my family out into this huge ocean we call living, other teachers came. They always came into my path gently, and the words they told me I quickly analyzed, dissected, and filed away as either true or false. However, many of the ideas I deemed false still continued to circle around in my mind afterward, whether I wanted them to or not. Then one day I heard a wise man say something that began the change in me. He said simply that some things are true, whether you believe them or not.
Now hearing that stopped me in my tracks. I had to repeat it to myself several times before I could even process it. I wondered if it was possible that some of the things I had quickly dismissed from my life as ludicrous could in fact have been true anyway. So even if it didn’t make sense and even if it didn’t fit in with the way I thought things should be, and even if I totally disbelieved it, could it possibly be truth anyway. And that is when I opened my mind and began to learn. I began to listen with an open heart, without quickly filing it into my mind’s careful categories. I allowed the ideas to just be that, a new idea, a new thought, however foreign.
Of course, now that I was allowing some light in, that also meant I could see more clearly, what was already in there. So then, I had to start dealing with some of the old beliefs, and that was the most difficult part. Those were locked in big metal safes in my mind, with many security features in place. If that were true, then what about this? No. No. That would make some other person in my life, who had taught me that, wrong. That was difficult to deal with but not as difficult as questioning the things I had taught myself. After all, I was a rational, thinking, sometimes even intelligent human being. And if I had looked at something and decided it was right, how could it now be wrong? Could I be wrong?
A carpenter would say that sometimes a house can be stabilized, as it is, with minor repair, but that there are some cases when the only solution is to tear the house down to its foundation and begin again. And sometimes even the foundation itself has to be replaced. And he’d also tell you that doing that is a big job.
So my life has become a process of taking in something, fighting myself not to dismiss it too quickly, then holding it up to the light along with what I thought I knew, and deciding which to keep and which to throw out. And I was never very good at parting with my stuff. But we have to free ourselves of some of our stuff to make room for better stuff. And so I try to do that.
And I also have realized through all this, that like decorating a home, you never get finished. Life is a continuing process of replacing the sofa only to find the drapes no longer match, and neither does the rug. But you know what else I learned? That this process can actually be fun. Hard work, yes. But fun. And isn’t that what life is suppose to be? Out with the old, in with the new?
Of course, some things are replaced very reluctantly, and some things I cannot bear to part with never are replaced. But that’s ok. I can live with that.
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